Loccomama

Saturday, 16 August 2014

After my Stockholm getaway endless work and appointments immediately
tense me up. It is time like this when I have absolutely no idea what to
cook but eating out while having a nutritional meal can be very costly.
So this evening I just put everything I have inside and outside the
fridge for this vegetable stew. There are beetroots, cherry tomatoes,
biryani rice, tomato and basil paste, red lentils, quinoa, cabbage, raw
salt and some peppers. To my surprise – yumm!

I regretted right at the moment as I got
the visa after a gasping interrogation at the embassy. Pole-apart from
what I had expected, that embassy visits were nothing more than
form-filling and queues, this time to the Nigerian one ironically
offered more. I got stone-cold questions, hostile attitudes, though I
had every (bizarre) required documents stated on the embassy website,
including an “invitation letter” signed by my Nigerian contact.

The tiny glass at the counter divided me
and the well- attired gentleman with the resemblance of Nelson Mandela,
who threw to me what an FBI officer would smear over a drug dealer’s
face. From my actual identity to my purpose of visit to my ‘potential
conspiracy’… every razor sharp question cracked from his black lips made
me feel like a prisoner without cuffs, or a smuggler who tried to get
into the American border. “Good People. Great Country” This tagline on a
poster at the door came into my sight as a wry joke.

Global city in a great country?

Autumn heat was still steaming the city
airport. Black gentlemen, looking spick and span in his suits,
effortlessly made his way through the crowd of puzzled foreign visitors
into a rusty yellow cab and disappeared into the vast megacity. Welcome
to Lagos, the Centre of Excellence – the stately neon light box was
losing its glow to the everyday blackouts. Nothing but the word ‘chaos’
was valid.

Those close to the authority fashioned
diplomatic affability to just-landed Chinese investors, humbled
themselves to push their guests’ luggage through the Customs counters,
and happily received monetary rewards from the yellow hands. By
exchanging merely basic hellos and all that jazz, policemen outside the
airport helped your vehicle stop for a few bucks in return.“This is the
way how things work here,” William Lui, a food factory owner from Hong
Kong, whom I luckily ran into at the airport, said as he settled me in
his car. Lui after that offered me his transportation throughout my
stay, because cab drivers might take ‘white people’ – it was a black or
white world, no yellow – to shaded alleys and rob them. Not only ‘white
people’, my local photographer assured me. He wouldn’t ask for
directions at night as well. Besides the local market cramped with cars
and pedestrians, shops and restaurants had armed guards stationed at the
gate. There was no such thing as ‘window shopping’ and ‘menu checking’.
Furious traffic jam happened every morning and evening and it is almost
a daily routine to be stuck in the middle of the chaos of roads and
have your itinerary naturally cancelled. One night I was forced to
cancel my dinner appointment because I stayed on the roads for four
hours. What Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s national pride and music mogul from
Lagos, once sang in ‘Go Slow’ in 1972 – Lorry dey for your front // Tipa
dey for your back // Motorcycle dey for your left o // Taxi-moto dey
for your right // Helicopter dey fly fly for your top o – is still the
best depiction of its everyday cityscape.